Italian Journey Research Articles

Francesco Salviati's North Italian Journey

Francesco Salviati's North Italian Journey

Francesco Salviati's North Italian Journey

In the spring of 1539, after a sojourn of more than seven years in Rome, Francesco Salviati made a journey to North Italy that was of considerable importance for his subsequent development.1 The facts of the journey are known or can be deduced in some detail. Immediately before leaving Rome, Francesco had been engaged on the decoration of the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollate He completed his Visitation there in 1538, and was probably preparing a project for the Birth of the Baptist in an adjacent space when a rivalry with Jacopino del Conte, another of the young painters working in the Oratory, caused him to withdraw from the program of decoration.2 According to Vasari, Francesco returned to Florence to visit his family at this point, but he was undoubtedly also tempted by the possibility of employment at the recently established court of Cosimo I de’ Medici. He was, in fact, promptly engaged to participate in the decorations for Cosimo's forthcoming marriage to Eleonora da Toledo, but this work did not ...

Francesco Salviati's North Italian Journey

In the spring of 1539, after a sojourn of more than seven years in Rome, Francesco Salviati made a journey to North Italy that was of considerable importance for his subsequent development.1 The facts of the journey are known or can be deduced in some detail. Immediately before leaving Rome, Francesco had been engaged on the decoration of the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollate He completed his Visitation there in 1538, and was probably preparing a project for the Birth of the Baptist in an adjacent space when a rivalry with Jacopino del Conte, another of the young painters working in the Oratory, caused him to withdraw from the program of decoration.2 According to Vasari, Francesco returned to Florence to visit his family at this point, but he was undoubtedly also tempted by the possibility of employment at the recently established court of Cosimo I de’ Medici. He was, in fact, promptly engaged to participate in the decorations for Cosimo's forthcoming marriage to Eleonora da Toledo, but this work did not hold his interest for long. Perhaps Bronzino seemed too formidable a rival for Medici patronage: Salviati never worked well in the face of competition. In any event, around the end of June he appeared in Bologna, having left Carlo Portelli to complete his Coronation of Cosimo for the wedding festivities. He spent a few days with Vasari, who has just returned to Bologna from Camaldoli to undertake a commission at San Michele in Bosco.3 Friends attempted to obtain a commission for Salviati to paint an altarpiece for the Ospedale della Morte, but they were not successful; and after leaving drawings to be engraved by Girolamo Fagiuoli, Salviati continued his journey. Voss has postulated a visit to Parma at this point because of the increase of Parmigianino influence in Salviati's north Italian works.4 Such a visit was not essential for an acquaintance with Parmigianino's style, which Salviati had surely already known from paintings, drawings, and prints in Rome and Bologna;5 but it is quite possible that he stopped for a day or two before proceeding to Venice, where his presence seems implied by Pietro Aretino in a letter to Leone Leoni of July 11.6

Chaucer's Use of the Teseida

The influence of Italian writers on Chaucer has been described by the use of such general terms as “renaissance,” “humanism,” or “Italian atmosphere,” and also by the enumeration of borrowed passages and the recognition of similarities of plot. Some critics believe that the Italian journeys opened new vistas for Chaucer in literature and life, while others hold that from Italy he derived only certain lines and stories. Consideration of this problem in terms of just one poem, Boccaccio's Teseida, is narrow and inconclusive, but has the advantages of being specific and of permitting an evolutionary—as opposed to a static—point of view; for of all Italian writings except Dante's Commedia, the Teseida served Chaucer the most widely. It formed the basic material out of which he created the Knight's Tale, and was the source of passages in Anelida and Arcite, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Franklin's Tale, and possibly the House of Fame.

Some stray notes on Mozart - V: 'Don Giovanni' in London

MOST of the operas which the Mozarts, father and son, listened to in the course of their Italian journeys of 1769-1773 have been identified. Some of them, however, have so far defeated detection, the allusions in the Mozart letters being rather vague and scanty. They were all produced at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, and as there exists no reliable theatrical or operatic chronology of that town before the opening of the Scala in 1778, information could not easily be derived from independent

I. A Planetary Date for Chaucer's Troilus

All students of Chaucerian chronology are agreed that Troilus and Criseyde was written not earlier than the poet's first Italian journey of 1373, and not later than 1386. The second of these terminal dates is fixed by the fact that the earlier, so-called B, version of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which refers to Troilus as already in circulation, is assigned with a good deal of confidence to 1386 or 1387. It is further corroborated by the fact that Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, which shows extensive acquaintance with Troilus, seems to have been written in 1387, the year before its author's death.

An Inedited Document Concerning Chaucer's First Italian Journey.

An Inedited Document Concerning Chaucer's First Italian Journey.